Supply chain, enterprise and site planning applications and environments are widely used by manufacturing industries for decision support and to help manage complex manufacturing operations. In contrast with conventional planning software applications that provide a monolithic application architecture, products are becoming available to support multi-domain, distributed and heterogenous planning environments that characterize present day supply chains. One such product is the RHYTHM COLLABORATION suite of software products available from i2 Technologies, Inc.
An inherent characteristic of such products, and in particular the multi-domain heterogenous architecture of the RHYTHM COLLABORATION suite, is that they support products spanning multiple domains. The products supplied by the seller domain in the collaboration are consumed by the buyer domain. It is not uncommon that the product supply is constrained and does not meet the buyer demand. This, in general, leads to lost sales and customer dissatisfaction for the seller domain and can be further detrimental to the multi-enterprise supply chain as the buyer domain may not be able to satisfy its own customers in a timely fashion.
A solution to the problem is to provide the buyer domain with a list of viable alternate products that can be consumed instead of the original product. This will also extend the domain of the decision support across multiple enterprises in the supply chain. It is desirable for decision support software to cover even larger domains in the decision making process because typically, the larger the domain of the decision support, the more optimal the decision will be. It is the purpose of the present invention to develop a system and process for providing such product alternates to partners in a multi-enterprise collaborative supply chain.